


Threondy for a Brown Girl

by karrenia_rune



Category: Phantom Passenger That Wants A Ride Home (Urban Legend)
Genre: Fic or Treat Meme, Gen, Gift Work, Magic-Users, Magical Realism, Necromancer AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-21
Updated: 2020-04-21
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:22:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23771506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karrenia_rune/pseuds/karrenia_rune
Comments: 4
Kudos: 4
Collections: Once Upon a Fic 2020





	Threondy for a Brown Girl

**Author's Note:**

  * For [badritual](https://archiveofourown.org/users/badritual/gifts).



"Threnody for a Brown Girl"

"Momma! Momma," Sabine called.

My mother was not hard of hearing, it was as if she went selectively deaf. when she got into that kind of single-minded fugue.  
And today just made it all the worse. "I need to talk to ya!"

Momma Beth Coleman hummed a melodious tune while she nudged the door the house open while gently cradling the basket of goods purchased at the Night Market.   
It opened after sundown and closed at first light; it almost always carried the items that could not be found anywhere else. 

"Run along and play, Sabine; Momma's busy."

"I know that, it's... """ Sabine trailed off unable to sort through the torrent of emotions that were roiling through her own mind and which were subsequently brought on a major throbbing headache. 

She reached up and pinched the skin along the bridge of her nose in an attempt to lessen it. "Let me carry that basket," she offered.  
"Sabine."

"Yes, Momma," Sabine replied.

"I know how you feel about tomorrow's night ceremony. If you are not comfortable with participating I will understand: It can be quite, ah taxing."

"Sure, Momma."

Sabine had known that the events of the following day were coming it was not really fair of her to resent, but it still rankled like an itch she was unable to scratch that lay just beneath her own skin.

It was the fourth anniversary of her older sister's Sabine's death.

Now, in most families they would have held a memorial ceremony and then inviited all their closest friends and families over for a dinner in honor of the dearly departed one; but they were not most families.

They came from a long line of those either born with magical power or had it passed down through generations of mostly women but also a handful of warlocks hailing from Haiti and this latest branch of the family tree had settled here in the Antebellum region of rural South Carolina.

She and her sister, Sheena, had loved that big house and its pointed dormers and asymmetrical lines when they were kids, playing in the big back yard with its fenced in rose arbors and the smell of jasmine and herbs from the garden perfuming the air at all hours of the day and night. 

The two of them had been nearly inseparable, even if Sabine had been the instigator of some of their more daring and dangerous adventures which had gotten them into trouble with not only their family but the local authorities as well.

Now Sabine was dead. She died in a car accident almost a year ago. Today was the anniversary of her death.

It was not like I could talk to the dead. No one in our long line of magic users had had that ability since great, great, great, great grandma Nadine back in the 1800s.   
Still, shortly after Sabine died it was if her ghost lingered around these parts; no if I wanted to talk the dead I rather remember as she was when she was alive, vibrant, and full of laughter and mischief.  
***  
The ceremony

In the small carriage house that at least three generations of their family had used as a workshop, andstorehouse for the paraphernalia of their art, Beth Coleman had set up a shrine to her lost daughter, surrounding with framed photographs taken at very stages of the girl's life, from when she had been a toddler all the way through early adolescence. 

Arranged strategeically around the space were candles of all sizes and shapes, and colors, some the bone-white color of ivory, but mostly all black, flickering in the brisk wind that came in from the high windows.

Resting on the table was a knife that she already cleaned and prepared for tonight's ritual. She had made certain to wear loose-fitting clothes becase she would have roll up the sleeves to bare her wrists for the blood-letting. Beth could have used one of the goats that they kept aroun the property, but she would rather do this herself. Spirits tended to be hungry, for blood especially.

In keeping with the traditions of the Paleo Mayombe, she had already spent time creating the Nganga, a big cast-iron pot into which was placed many of the favorite things associated with the deceased one. 

She got down on her haunches and began to dry pentegram on the stone floor of with chalk and then surrounding it with both outer and inner rings of mystical runes.  
If the spirits of the ancestor were good and the proper incantations were spoken correctly, soon, very soon Beth would be reunited with her lost daughter, Sabine. It often helped to invoke the spirits of the time or place in which one found themselves, but Beth wanted to use their native language of Haiti. So in the mix of English and Creole.

_"Ancestors, I praise you with the Earth in my palm!  
I praise you with the raging fires in my heart!  
I praise you with my breath as I give offerings to your greatness!  
I praise you with the blood and water of life within my body!  
I call forth for you with honor for all eternity!" She picked up the knife, rolled up her sleeve and cut a rituall slow gash in her left wrist. "I call on thee! Bring my daughter back to me!"_

The wind gusted, the candles flickered, the panes in the windows rattled causing spider-web like cracks through them, and the runes within the magical circle were shilloutted in an etheral glow. "Now, we wait. Waiting is always the hardest part," Beth sighed.

***  
Interlude

Elsewhere, a girl with raven black opened her eyes with a taste in her mouth as if she'd been chewing on rusty nails.   
It made her gag, and when nothing came up except bile, she t tried to spit out the foul taste. After a bit she came to the realization that she was lying spread-eagled on her back in the middle of the remnants of a mystical circle.

A magic circle was something that she had not seen for a very long time, and the sight of it brought back a whole host of memories, some pleasant, and some not so pleasant. 

There many purposes to which a magic circle could be put, summoning, scrying, another pools, and crystal balls were better for that and confining magical energies, and the last, resurrection. 

Judging by her immediate surroundings and the specific runes and symbols within both the outer and inner connentric rings of the circle it was most likely the last one.  
Which meant someone was attempting to bring her back from the dead. She really wished they would not go to all that trouble. 

While she knew it was possible given her familes lineage and history of magic users, bringing someone back from the dead also had a long and well-documented history of those brough back coming out wrong, and that never ended well for anyone involved. "Damn, why now? And why can't I get rid of these chains? This sucks; this royally sucks."

Her memories were hazy which made it difficult to concentrate, and these being dead felt like she was attempting to span a gulf without a bridge to cross over and would be forced to make the jump over instead. 

Other memories swirled in her mind, memories of her life before her death in the car crash; her sister's Sheena's blanket fort in the living room during a week-long storm which had driven their mother to distraction. 

Suddenly the smell of must, mold and dampness that pervaded the entire room in which Sabine found herself in was overtaken with the sweeter much more pleasant aroma of roses in bloom, jasmine, and scents of the family's herb garden. 

"Well, at least my memories are coming back, I would hate to think I've been brought back as only half a person." 

Sabine began to laugh, and laugh beginning on a low key note and than becoming increasingly higer-pitched. 

Sheena, if she had been there would have called 'rising hysterical laughter, and she would have been right, as she was the one who had had her nose buried in a book.   
As much as a relief as it was to have her memories of her life come back to her, Sabine was searching her mind for the proper spell to counteract the runes that kept her confined to the magical circle. 

Sheer blunt force would not work even if she had been strong enough to do so.

"Oh, hell no! This can't be happening right now!"

"Afraid it is, sister," another voice broke Sabine out of her ruminations. "Fancy meeting you here,'" a voice remarked and it sounded both fond and gruff and distant at the same time. He was dressed in a long black trenchcoat and had a wide-brimmed hat perched at a jaunty angle on his head.

It was low and husky, with an accent that hinted at being from more than place, and decidely male.

"Who are you?" Sabine asked.

"Just a wayfarer, like you. Seems to me that the difference between the two of us, is that you look as if you could use a hand." He offered her a small smile.

"Well, yes." Sabine allowed convinced that she still could come up with a counter-measure on her own. "But, if you had any suggestions....feel free to offer them."

"Reach out to me, and clasp palms, and concentrate on the reversal of the rune not with your eyes but with your mind."

Sabine huffed. "I knew that."

"Sure you did," the man replied.

After several minutes of the two of them concentrating the chains and magical circle vanished into the ether and the man in black helped her to stand. "You got a name?"

"Sabine." You?"

"Don't have a proper one, not as I can rightly remember, cause I've come and gone from this place many, many times, but as I were on formal introductions, you may call me the Ferryman."

"Like shepherding lost souls?" Sabine asked."

"More or less, but you don't seem to be as lost as most other souls."

"Can we get out of here?" Sabine asked.

"Well, see, now, that depends on where it is that you want to go. Some souls want to move on, some fight tooth and nail to stay tethered to the places, and people that they loved in love, and someone want to hang around these ah, in-between place."

"Is that what this is?" Oh, as far as I can tell, I'm not a ghost."

"No, no, not a ghost, just a spirit," the ferryman replied.

"Haha! Very funny. Just my luck I die, I get summoned back and the person responsbile for my passage has a lousy sense of humor."

The Ferryman shrugged. "That joke would have killed in the cocktail Lounge of Lost Souls."

"There is no such thing!"

"You'd be suprised. "Come on now, where do you want to go?"

"I want to see my family, I want to talk to them."

"Sure, but I do not know if that last part will be possible."

"Why not, it is very difficult for the dead to communicate with the living, and for the living to able to hear the dead. The membrane between the world of the living and the world of the dead is rather impenetrable at the best of times, but it can be pierced."

"Hmm, you've never met my family." Yeah, I know. Just please, take me to them."

"As you wish."  
****  
The message

"We're here. What do you want to say them? Be advised, this is highly unusual and if the message will be able to cross the threshold you should take care to be exact with your wording and phrasing."

"I got it," Sabine replied as she planted her feet on seemingly thin air, squared her shoulders and folded her arms over her chest."

"Momma, Sheena, I don't know if you can hear me, or even see me, but this yearly anniversary of trying to bring back either my body or my soul from the dead has really got to stop."

"I, I know you love me, and miss me, and ditto for how I feel about you, Momma, and Sheena, but I had my life and lived it, and even if our family has the power to bring people back from the dead, perhaps it comes down to a fact that it even if could come back...." 

She realized that she was crying, and she did not know that spirits could cry, reached up to rub the traitours moisture away with the back of her hand, and continued, "could come back, I don't think it's in the cards, so, all I'm saying is that you need to let me go."

"Could you be any more cryptic?" Sabine griped.

"Yes, do you want me to be?" the Ferryman replied.

"You're impossible." 

"Yes, thank you."  
***  
Conclusion

Meanwhile, in the world of the living, Beth waited for a sign. She had been so preoccupied that she had not noticed that Sheena had slipped into the carriage house. Sheena rolled her eyes when she saw the remnants of the magical circle conjuring on the ground and the used up candles and blood dripping from her mother's wrist.   
Typical, so caught up in the ritual she did not even take the time to properly take care of the wound.

Sheena did not say anything, as much as she wanted to, simply went over to the cabinet in which they kept a first-aid kit and other mundane supplies and then went back over to her mother waited, and began to clean and dress, then bandage it. "Well," she said, did anything happen?"

"When did you become such a pessimist?" Beth asked.

"Since about the fourth anniversary of you doing this," Sheena replied.

"It worked, you just have to believe."

"I believe."

Just then whatever else she was about to say was cut off by a glowing message in letters of fire. "I Love you both, But, you need to let me go."

"Looks like it worked."

"Looks like you got your answer."

Please refrain from saying I told you so."

"Momma, I know you love Sabine, but she wants to move on, Who are we to say that she can't do that?"

"I so wanted to bring her back. So, so much," Beth replied.

Sheena came over and rested a comforting hand on her mother's shoulder. "I know, I know, and it's okay to want something that bad that you would literally do anything to make it happen, but even if you want it that badly, and you love something or someone so much that it hurts; you have to be willing to let it go."

Beth felt tears spring to her own eyes and patted Sheena's hand where it rested on her shoulder. "Very well. I can let go."

"Promise?"

"I Promise," Beth replied.  
***  
"Have you considered becoming my assistant?" the Ferryman asked suddenly. "You'd make a great apprentice."

"Shepherding lost souls, piercing the veil between worlds."

"We could pretty much anywhere we wanted, within reason, of course."

"Of course."

"Well, what are my other options?"

"You could move on, go where other souls eventually end up, but somehow I don't think that will be your fate," the Ferryman replied. "What do you say?"

Sabine considered for a moment, "Then, I say, yes." Let's get out of here. Maybe, somewhere down the line, you'll tell me how you became a ferryman, hmm."

"And pigs will fly." He snorted, taking her arm and they both disappeared into the ether.


End file.
